As the dust settles on the Gorton and Denton by-election, separatist tendencies in any part of Great Britain are, like the anti-industrial Malthusianism and misanthropy of the Green agenda, and like the stupefaction of the workers or the youth, as pernicious as the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the treatment of identity politics as equal or superior to class politics, the treatment of gender identity as equal or superior to biological sex, the cancel culture of which our people have always been the principal victims, the erosion of civil liberties, the consideration of any all-Ireland settlement that failed to preserve the National Health Service and other such achievements, or the failure to recognise that a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency had as much of that currency as it chose to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect, means that therefore needed to be under democratic political control.
Instead of those, we want to strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty. In the struggle for economic equality, the leading role belongs to those who suffer most from its absence, namely the working class, while in the struggle for international peace, the leading role belongs to those who suffer most from its absence, namely the working class and the youth.
Social solidarity is an expression of personal responsibility, personal responsibility is protected by social solidarity, international solidarity is an expression of national sovereignty, and national sovereignty is protected by international solidarity. Equality and diversity must include economic equality and class diversity, regional equality and regional diversity, the equal sovereignty of diverse states, and equal respect for diverse opinions within a framework of free speech and other civil liberties, including due process of law with the presumption of innocence, requiring that conviction be beyond reasonable doubt.
In speaking of democratic political control, what is the demos? At the 2021-22 census, there were 10.7 million people who had been born abroad. They would have included Cliff Richard until he decamped to the Republic of Barbados. They included Boris Johnson. They included Daniel Hannan. They included Peter Hitchens. They included me. We are all British citizens, but the thing about allowing only British citizens to vote is that Britain has never done it. Almost no other country allows any category of non-citizen to vote. In the United States, you cannot become President unless you were born there. Imagine suggesting there or in Israel that any non-citizen should have the vote. National Conservatives have picked the wrong laboratory here, where an Irish or Commonwealth citizen could in principle become Prime Minister. Is anyone still sitting in the House of Commons for an English, Scottish or Welsh seat without being a British citizen, or for a Northern Irish seat without being British or Irish? That may now be an open goal for rivals to be First Past the Post. Yet it is perfectly possible.
Last year, the Migrant Democracy Project was merely stating the obvious when it called this country's qualifications for voting "colonial". Britain has a long, recent, and arguably ongoing imperial history. It was in the EU for two generations. It is mercantile. De Gaulle was right to call us "maritime", but not to call us "insular". Citizens of countries that were in the French Empire when he said that now have the vote in Britain as citizens of the Commonwealth. We already enfranchise the Commonwealth citizens of Rwanda, Mozambique, Gabon and Togo, none of which was ever in the British Empire. Why let a Gabonese or a Togolese vote, but not an American or an Israeli?
Extending suffrage to citizens of countries with which we had a connection is so British that it is positively Burkean, like the NHS. And Britain is now globally noted for its superdiversity, a so far unique combination of having people from every inhabited territory on Earth, of having some level of ethnic diversity down to every neighbourhood and village, and of having a huge and exponentially increasing mixed-race population in the society that accepted mixed-race people and couples more than anywhere else. So, since there would seem to be no remaining example to the contrary, require parliamentary candidates to be British citizens in Great Britain, or British or Irish citizens in Northern Ireland. But either restrict the franchise in the same way, or let everyone vote. Those two options should be put to the House of Commons, with whichever passed by the larger majority coming into effect, or with neither of them doing so if both had been defeated.
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